New Moon Question: 9 Lives

Even if it were not the New Moon, I could not see her today. This desert that begs water from her sister mountains is enveloped in mist and clouds, moments of rain, swatches of snow.

The waning of the moon is always an opportunity for a descent, a surrendering, a death before the New Moon offers us a new beginning. I didn’t understand how literally and deeply last month’s Full Moon invitation to put something to rest would show up.

They say a cat has 9 lives. Certainly I have had so many since packing two 5-month-old kittens into a backpack, catching a cab, and roaring into the night home to a mice-infested Brooklyn apartment. I used to think this 9-lives-business meant nine consecutive, chronological lives, but I realize in this writing that this is not so. There are some lives we contain that do appear to follow linear time—but others flow out and in more as some waves take a long time to come to shore, while others ebb and flow quickly, with or without much to-do. Some life is utterly private, unknown to any besides the body living it—will never be mentioned in a eulogy. The life of dreams, the soul-life we are living invisibly that is trying to percolate and come to the surface, the life of our most intimate communion with Spirit.

Lou, our 17-year old cat—gave up his body this past week. He had been letting us know for a while that he was ready, but he was kind enough to wait until we were… until we were ready to gather around our hearth and hold him, while some medicine told his body it could surrender, and his spirit could be free. And this is what is asked in a ritual for rest: that something can be put down so something else may live.

While I want to tell you about this fearless explorer, clumsy for love, private cat I knew, I think I will take stock for a moment of the fact, that what I carried to the hole where we buried Lou, was not only his sweet stiffening body, but maybe the pieces of me that have been made stiff since I was that 20-year-old college student inviting completely unknown furballs into my life. I had no way to predict any of the lives I have had since I said yes to caring for, and sharing a home with two remarkable creatures.

This wander invitation is at least half art-project.

I’d like you to take some paper and make a list of your lives—it doesn’t have to be exhaustive, just get the juices going.

On a walk, or perhaps it unfolds over a period of time, be aware of objects in your surrounding that might stand in for each life you are carrying, living. Perhaps they are small stones or seeds, something else that winks at you. If it doesn’t disturb the environment, and they asked to be picked up, love them, study them, gather them, at least for this while, in something lovely. A little bag. A basket. A well-loved bowl.

The next part is entirely between you and Mystery. Maybe there is a call to keep them together for a while. Maybe you make a sort of timeline with them on the land. Maybe a mandala. Perhaps some stay with you for a time, while you feel ready to put others back. Perhaps they “cook” together for a while, and you monitor your own feeling of when they are ready to come out and be seen anew.

As usual, there is no end-game here, just a question to the Land and to Spirit about the structure of how we hold our lives, our parts, our wholeness.